The Fourth State of Matter

“In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.”

This passage introduces the importance of space to this essay, both thematically—the reach for the celestial to process death—and in terms of plot, as it introduces her work colleagues, “space physicists,” to the essay. The celestial images in this passage—the Milky Way like a blackboard smear and blinking Mars, all seen during the nightly trips to the yard with her dog—recur throughout the essay and contribute to the essay’s braided structure as Beard moves the reader from encounters with the dog, the squirrels, and her space-physics department workplace. The introduction of space and of Beard’s career also introduces the theme of The Tension Between the Scientific/Rational and the Emotion/Spiritual. She is consistently juggling the two sides, which are sometimes at war with one another (in the case of her collie) and sometimes working together in harmony (in her post-event reflections).

“The first few times this happened, I found the dog trying to stand up, gazing with frantic concern at her own rear. I praised her and patted her head and gave her treats until she settled down. Now I know whenever it happens, because I hear her tail thumping against the floor in anticipation of reward. In retraining her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load after load of laundry strangely satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog.”

Beard’s collie is a central figure throughout this essay; she serves as a symbol of looming death, only hers is natural and slow, which starkly contrasts with the violent deaths of Beard’s colleagues. Beyond the “broomstick legs” Beard describes earlier in the essay (Paragraph 2), this passage continues to describe the care she gives to the dog, but also how this constant care has reversed the roles between the two: The dog now has Beard trained, as Beard articulates when she says, “She is Pavlov and I am her dog.” In this way, Beard suggests that her life feels out of her control at this point. This sense of overwhelm permeates the narrative in every thread leading up to the shooting.

“‘You have control over this,’ he explains in his professor voice. ‘You can decide how long she suffers.’

This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say what I really want: for her to go to sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world.”

In this passage, work and home life collide as Beard discusses with her friend and colleague Christopher Goertz her predicament over how to handle her ailing collie. Goertz argues that Beard can control her dog’s suffering, which eerily contrasts with the senseless lack of control Gang Lu’s victims could exert thanks to his violent and premeditated deed. While Beard resists euthanasia, akin to violence, even to the point of complete stagnancy in life, Gang Lu uses violence to solve his problems.

“Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike features, will appear at the door to my office and identify herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs.”

While most of the essay is written in the present tense as these events unfold for Beard in 1991, this passage defies that tense for a moment as it leaps forward to the aftermath of the shooting, roughly two months afterward. The passage describes a friend of one of the victims asking to be taken to the room where, readers learn later, Gang Lu began his attack on the space-physics department. This passage backshadows Lu’s violence, giving the reader insight into what is to come via a time jump.

“Gang Lu looks around the room with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob, who talks to him as if he is a dog; the student Shan, whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter.”

Most of this essay is written from the first-person perspective, but this passage shifts to an omniscient narrator, giving clearer insight into Gang Lu’s internal state. This passage closes with the clearest foreshadowing of Lu’s violence with the introduction of the gun.

“It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life.”

This simple sentence marks a turn in the essay. It introduces the date of the violent and tragic shooting of Beard’s colleagues in the University of Iowa’s space-physics department while simultaneously introducing the emotional significance of this date in that it marks a new period of her life.

“Friday-afternoon seminar, everyone is glazed over, listening as someone at the head of the long table explains something unexplainable. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the department chairman, Dwight, is sitting in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns, walks back up the stairs, and enters the seminar room again. Chris Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head. There is a loud popping sound and then blue smoke. Linhua Shan gets the second bullet in the forehead; the lenses of his glasses shatter. More smoke and the room rings with the popping. Bob Smith tries to crawl beneath the table. Gang Lu takes two steps, holds his arms straight out, and levels the gun with both hands. Bob looks up. The third bullet in the right hand, the fourth in the chest. Smoke. Elbows and legs, people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room.”

This passage methodically describes Gang Lu’s violent attack on the space-physics department. There is a clinical tone to the language here and even a shift toward shorter, more staccato sentences to emulate the discrete popping of the bullets, including the introduction of fragments such as “Smoke,” toward the end of the passage.

“The administrator, Anne Cleary, is summoned from her office by the receptionist. She speaks to him for a few minutes, he produces the gun and shoots her in the face. The receptionist, a young student working as a temp, is just beginning to stand when he shoots her. He expels the spent cartridges in the stairwell, loads new ones. Reaches the top of the steps, looks around. Is disoriented suddenly. The ringing and the smoke and the dissatisfaction of not checking all the names off the list. A slamming and a running sound, the shout of police. He walks into an empty conference room, takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and puts it over the back of a chair. Checks his watch: twelve minutes since it began. Places the barrel against his right temple. Fires.”

This passage continues to describe Lu’s attack on the space-physics department and builds on the staccato and increasingly fragmented sentence structure that marks the portrayal of such violence. Perhaps more clearly in this passage, Beard seems to slip into Lu’s perspective through the moves of a more omniscient narrator.

“The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen.”

The news of the shooting has started to trickle in, if chaotically and piecemeal. Friends have flocked to Beard’s home to be with her as the reality comes to piece itself together, but the chaos and the tenor of emotions are too much for Beard, so she sequesters herself in her study. This space holds a distinct tension: It is “cold’ and yet “brightly lit,” which perhaps gives Beard a clearer, sharper space to process these events.

“Oh no, oh God. I lean against Mary’s chair and then leave the room abruptly. I have to stand in the bathroom for a while and look at myself in the mirror. I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from wires. In the living room she’s pronouncing all the other names.”

Finally hearing the news, Beard is on the verge of collapse; she retreats, this time not to the study but to the bathroom. The mirror serves as an important image in this scene, as Beard is able to watch herself as she processes this information and is able to converse with herself: “I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair.” The reader even sees Beard’s sense of humanity with her very specific earrings marked by “tiny wrenches that hang from wires.” Ambient to this conversation with herself in the mirror, the news continues to list the names of Gang Lu’s victims. The mirror provides Beard the opportunity to slow time and assess her reality—something she previously avoided.

“I tell the white face in the mirror that Gang Lu did this, wrecked everything and murdered all those people. It seems as ludicrous as everything else. I can’t get my mind to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s facts; today hasn’t jelled yet. ‘It’s a good thing none of this happened,’ I say to my face. A knock on the door, and I open it […] I bring the collie in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to my face and I take her muzzle and we move through the gears slowly—first second third fourth—all the way through town, until what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting to come in, from people who just saw the faces on the news.”

With a greater disconnect after the rest of the names trickle through the television screen into Beard’s home and into her ears, Beard shifts away from telling herself this news to telling a more distant “white face in the mirror” that this is Gang Lu’s fault. It’s only her friend Julene’s knock at the door and the introduction of the collie that nudges Beard back to reality, back to the living room where her friends have gathered to support her.

“A knock comes on the door. Julene settles the dog down again on her blanket. It’s the husband at the door, looking distraught. He hugs me hard, but I’m made of cement, arms stuck in a down position.

The women immediately clear out, taking their leave, looking at the floor. Suddenly it’s only me and him, sitting in our living room on a Friday night, just like always. I realize it took courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who think he’s the Antichrist. The dogs are crowded against him on the couch and he’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. He’s here to help me get through this. Me. He knows how awful this must be.”

Another knock at the door reveals Beard’s “vanished husband,” who has haunted her throughout the essay but is physically present for the first time. He embraces Beard, and the circle of friends who have supported Beard throughout the first few hours of this crisis clear out. The normalcy of the two of them sitting together on their sofa on a Friday night eerily contrasts with the monumental and tragic news he is there to help Beard “get through,” which is so foreign and alien to Beard’s reality.

“I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and stars and stars. The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside where the heat is.

The house is empty and dim, full of dogs and cigarette butts. The collie has peed again. The television is flickering ‘Special Report’ across the screen and I turn it off before the pictures appear. I bring blankets up, fresh and warm from the dryer.”

The house is cavernously haunted after the buzz of support from friends and her husband, but also offers the familiarity of the collie having another accident and needing another set of freshly washed bedding. The collie’s training of Beard persists through this tragedy.